Radiohead experiment works

Radiohead's attempt to sell its music on a volunteer system of payment seems to have paid off.

Reports suggest that more than 1.2 million fans downloaded the Radiohead album on its first day of sale. The band is not saying how much cash it made, but the Times newspaper has surveyed more than 3,000 fans and found that the average price was £4. This is half the amount that iTunes charges, and based on this price earned the band £10 million.

Associated Press points out that if Radiohead were contracted to a record company, the band would have had to sell 10 times that number of physical albums to collect the same profit. Meanwhile, a deluxe boxed version of In Rainbows, which includes a double vinyl disc, a book, eight bonus tracks and two CDs, as well as a download free of digital rights management has already taken 700,000 orders.